One needn’t be a writer to appreciate the essays in Jesmyn Ward’s collected nonfiction, filled as they are with insights and observations about the two-time National Book Award–winning author’s childhood and upbringing in rural Mississippi, her experience raising a Black son in the United States, and the personal tragedies that have impacted her life. But the book holds special treasures for writers looking for examples of how art, and writing in particular, helps us survive. The collection features Ward’s “Why Fiction Matters” address at the Library of Congress in 2023, the speech she delivered at Toni Morrison’s memorial in 2019, her Eudora Welty lecture “You Tell Your Story: You Survive,” and essays about authors such as Octavia Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Writers were magic-workers,” she writes in the introduction about a realization she had in the library of her elementary school. Readers of On Witness and Respair will know the feeling.
